* For Millennials, brand identification might be as important as religious or ethnic affiliation. This is certainly true for me, though I’m a bit older than the Millennials. I would happily spill blood to defend my favorite brands.
* Tim Lee has written a discouraging post on “The Problem with Voting By Mail.”
* Michael Pettis has a brilliant idea that, alas, will never be put into practice — putting China’s surpluses to work in U.S. infrastructure projects:
Let China engage in a massive rebuilding of US infrastructure – it can build airports, highways, damns, and railways – which would raise investment levels enough to keep the US trade deficit high in a way that benefits the US and China.
Of course China would also have the right to charge for the use of these projects so that it can earn a positive return on its investment. The return doesn’t even need to be high – just better than the return it gets on its huge expansion in investment in China, which I suspect is negative for the country as a whole.
Added bonus: we can keep buying cheap Chinese imports. Of course, desperately poor Chinese households won’t find Pettis’s New Deal terribly appetizing, as he notes in his concluding paragraph.
* Andrew Winston doesn’t appreciate the extent to which leapfrogging technologies and private enterprise can overcome deteriorating public infrastructure, but he makes a good point about Google’s clean technology initiatives regardless.
Not surprisingly, I’d go much further than Winston: Google’s driverless cars project could dramatically increase the throughput of our roads with relatively modest additional public investments. As Scrooge McDuck used to say on the children’s television program DuckTales, the key to life is to “work smarter, not harder.”
* Can’t say I’m a fan of Vinod Khosla’s taste for public subsidies (though I can hardly blame him for the fact that taxpayers aren’t driving a hard enough bargain), but he’s making sense on the subject of the superiority of for-profit social enterprise over charitable efforts.
* After reading a dark, dark post on debt-deflation, Mehul Srivastava’s article on the rise of secondary cities in Brazil, Russia, and India made me slightly more optimistic about the future of humanity.